Rocket stove with bread oven

[Teach]

Straw Houses, here is a different take on the barrel approach and simplifies things somewhat providing you have a few basic metal working tools. This design incorporates the oven into the inside of the usual rocket stove barrel with some simple differences. Enjoy and good luck with your project.

weblife.org/capturing_heat/pdf/capturing_heat.pdf

[annpesch]

Hi...has anyone had the opportunity to try building a bread oven similar to the bell rocket oven that Donkey drew up for us?

I rigged up a rocket oven using an old grill (one of those big black round things), a couple of concrete blocks and a few old red clay bricks salvaged from an old chimney. I am absolutely amazed a the heat generated from a few twigs! I made supper tonight on the "rocket grill"--hamburgers, 2 pumpkin pies, and rhubarb crisp....it fed our family of 10.

I would really like to made a bell rocket oven....I would think that you could, during the initial firing, use the flame as you would a stove top....a "burner" for lack of a better word. After the inside of the oven is good and hot, put in breads, roasts, pies, etc....a couple of racks would be really nice as well.

Does the inside of the oven need to be rounded? Or could it be more rectangular? Rectangular would certainly be easier....

If anyone has attempted the bell rocket oven, I'd really love to hear your thoughts on it. Thanks!

[ikneadpizza]

Hey All,
My brothers and I have built a trailer-mounted beehive pizza oven (loosely based upon plans for the forno bravo pompeii oven, but out of castable refractory cement)

Underneath the oven floor, we have a stove pipe rocket stove encased in rockwool insulation that feeds up through the oven floor and into the beehive, inspired by the drawings posted on this thread.

We've fired the rocket several times and it burns wonderfully and very hot. After about 10 minutes of combustion, the stove pipe in the vertical is beyond 1000, the limit of my inferred thermometer. It can heat the inside of the oven up to about 300 degrees, possibly more if we let it go, but at that point we have always started a fire inside the oven as we kneed to build up heat in the hearth.

Here's a video showing it in operation.

As this is a first design, it's far from complete. We need to figure out how to get that insulation secure and complete, and wrapped in somehting to keep the elements off of it. We are also concerned about the high heat on the stove pipe (it's standard black simpson 6" steel pipe).

Other than those concerns, we LOVE it. I can get about a ton of hardwood scraps for free from a local hardwood mill/supplier, and the rocket stove is the perfect place to use those lengths of wood.

Where do we go from here:

Can we cast a rocket stove using building tubes and insulate that? Will that hold up to the motion of the trailer? In our next trailer, should we move up to an 8" opening and really try and generate a significant amount of heat for the oven's main operation? (pizza has to cook 3 ways: radiant heat from flames, convected heat moving over the roof of the oven, and heat from the soapstone hearth...could the rocket stove provide the source of convected heat and possibly even the radiant heat from flames? If we really have the stove going (when the metal gets red hot), flames will shoot out of the rocket stove 8-10" into the oven.)

I'd love suggestions.

I think this is a great idea, and would work wonderfully on it's own if I were to use the oven for breads and everyday cooking. Pizza is more challenging because it needs so much heat to cook well and quickly)

[canyon]

Great idea and excellent job making it real! I am grateful that you video'd it and posted that utube! I was just talking with my baker brother yesterday about this idea and here it is! Please keep us posted on how it works out in practice once you get some experience! Thank You!

If you are going to stick with the light guage stove pipe I would suggest replacing it with stainless when you burn out the black stuff. You can even find old used metalbestos( or even better excel) to use for it which is already insulated! I think I'd stick with that kind of thing over a cast piece for durability and ability to remove easily for transport. Just some random thoughts!

[ikneadpizza]

I'm not the first one to do it, though perhaps on a trailer? Thanks for the tip on the metalbestos or excel, one of the most challanging things when building something new like this is figuring out what to ask for.

Anyway, here's a video of a french baker baking and I see some similarities to his oven combustion chamber to my rocket stove:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4RiJs1a92U

[backbencher]

Hi,
This link gives details of a Rocket Stove Oven, seems that in Uganda its pretty popular.
www.rocketstove.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=5&Itemid=75
BB